Special counsel Jack Smith is requesting that a Washington, D.C. jury be briefed on former President Donald Trump's efforts to cast false doubts on the elections of 2012 and 2016 — a strategy the special counsel's team contends laid the groundwork for a criminal effort to overturn the 2020 election after Trump's defeat to Joe Biden.
Prosecutors in Tuesday's filing said that they want to focus on highlighting Trump's “historical record” of “false claims of election fraud.” Some of these claims were made as early as November 2012, when the former president issued a public tweet falsely suggesting that voting machines had switched votes from then-candidate Mitt Romney to former President Barack Obama, according to the filing.
